Personal Project Proposal – Carla Caban

For my final project I want to do a story about the death penalty in the United States. I want to take a closer look at how public opinion has changed back and forth throughout the years. I also want to show which states have the death penalty and which of them have used it the most. In addition I plan of showing the reasons why people might be for or against the death penalty as well as the cost of it versus life imprisonment.

For this story I would need to obtain the history of the death penalty in the United States and maybe even compare it to other countries, the number of people for and against it throughout the years, data on states and how many times they have made death row executions as well as gathering data about costs across different states on the death penalty versus life imprisonment.

For this story, I plan on using resources given to me in my Political Science class, The Judicial Process, and adapt that into data visualization. There are a few other websites that provide a lot of information and numbers that I can use to put together my story. I am thinking of using Timeline.js. to showcase the history of the death penalty. For the data on different states I plan on using highcharts and then show all of the data on a searchable sort table. For the rest of the data I find I will plan on using different kinds of tables from highcharts or Infogr.am.

Some unknowns might be sorting what information could be biased and what is not. Many of the website that provide information generally lean towards one side so I would really need to look at various publications and websites to clear that out. If things go wrong I plan on hopping into Lynda.com or another tool in order to improve or fix my problem and at the same time learn a new skill and improve the design of my project.